


That One Sad Fic Where Noelle's Dad Dies

by ArgentDandelion



Category: Deltarune (Video Game)
Genre: Comedy, Crack, Crack and Angst, Deltarune Saves & Resets, Fiction, Gen, Hospitals, Illnesses, Terminal Illnesses, Time Travel, Video & Computer Games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:49:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24764152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentDandelion/pseuds/ArgentDandelion
Summary: Kris calls Noelle and insists she skip school tomorrow, so she can play Dragon Blazers III with her father for the whole night.Comedy ensues.
Relationships: Noelle Holiday & Rudy Holiday
Kudos: 9





	That One Sad Fic Where Noelle's Dad Dies

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Dragon Blazers III](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23465818) by [ArgentDandelion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentDandelion/pseuds/ArgentDandelion). 



> To be more specific, it's the lighthearted, absurd comedy version, meant as a palate cleanser after its angstiness.

“Noelle.”  
  
“Wha—? Kris, it’s 3:00 AM….” Noelle said, squinting at her bedazzled cell phone in the darkness. (Ever since it assassinated her actual clock, she had to adapt.)  
  
“Skip school today. Go to your dad.”  
  
“…what? Why?”  
  
“Choose a game,” Kris said, with all the concision and emotion of a very ticked-off grandma.  
  
“Alright, Kris! I got it!” Noelle turned on a lamp and hurriedly scanned through the video game titles.  
  
_Mario Kart, Professor Layton, Grand Theft Auto…_  
  
Noelle smiled and pulled out a title. “Ah, the perfect one! _Silent Hill_!”  
  
“And for the love of Dog, do _not_ bring _Cooking Mama_. Sweet Angel, that will only make him die faster!”  
  
“Oh. Right. Shouldn’t bring anything _too_ relaxing.” Noelle put down _Silent Hill_ and chose _Dragon Blazers III._  
  
Noelle’s ears perked up. “Did…you just say ‘die faster’?”  
  
But Kris had abruptly hung up, like clothes in a closet.  
  
—–  
  
“Dad? Dad?” Noelle gently shook her father from his sleep. The lamp was on, beaming light onto his face.  
  
Rudy blinked blearily into the intense light. “Oh dear…now I’m getting medical care from _aliens._ ”  
  
Noelle frowned. “Come on, Dad! You said it yourself, we’re _deer monsters_.”  
  
Dimly, Rudy noticed the furniture setup was different from what he remembered. He glanced across the room: the flowers in the glass cover had been put on the small counter by the sink, leaving the angel doll dethroned and emanating an aura of rage. The Nontondo console, sitting on a bedside table, was hooked up to the hospital TV and trying to keep its relationship discreet.  
  
Emblazoned on the TV screen were the words “Dragon Blazers III”. It was drawn in fire-coated letters, as if overcompensating for a lack of innate coolness.  
Rudy yawned and looked outside. The sky was still dark. “Noelle, why are you waking me up in the middle of the night?”  
  
“It’s _not_ the middle of the night, Dad.” Noelle said sheepishly.  
  
“Oh, good.”  
  
“It’s 3:20 AM.”  
  
Just then Rudy noticed the bags under his daughter’s eyes, her messy hair, and the few crumbs stuck to the fuzz of her lips.  
  
“Noelle.”  
  
“Yes, Dad?”  
  
“Lick those lips of yours.”  
  
Noelle stared at him awkwardly.  
  
“You got crumbs stuck to your fuzzy lips, and I don’t think you’re going for a flavor saver.”  
  
“Dad, a flavor savor is a soul patch, not a mustache!”  
  
“We’re covered in fur. It’s kind of hard to tell the difference!”  
  
Rudy laughed, before pausing thoughtfully. “Eh, it doesn’t matter much. It’s not realistic for society to expect women to constantly shave.”  
  
“I mean, of course,” Noelle wrinkled her brow. “There’s no way anyone has the time for _full body shampooing_ and hair removal.”  
  
Noelle moved a tacky little chair closer to the bed (clearly intended for smaller visitors), and cringed at the squeak. Noelle smiled, and handed her father the other controller.  
  
She yelped.“Oh! Darn! It’s a single-player game!”  
  
“Ah, good. It’d be messy to be a player and _also_ married.” Rudy winked.  
  
“How’d you know it has a marriage option?” Noelle asked, befuddled. “….Never mind.”  
  
Rudy slowly leaned over, looking at the item Noelle held. “You only got one controller? Oh, it’s fine. I can always watch. You’re much better than me at these games anyway.”  
  
—-  
  
“Gosh darn it, Shella.”  
  
“Come on, Noelle! You can swear _harder_ than that.”  
  
Noelle blushed.  
  
“This is the last time I’ll _ever_ be able to see my little girl swear a blue streak.” Rudy said solemnly.  
  
“It’s the wish of a dying man, Noelle. Now let it rip!”  
  
“Fu–”  
  
—-  
  
Noelle painted the room blue as the ocean with the intensity and number of her swears…including two Rudy had never even heard before.  
  
Noelle hunched over with an exhausted look, panting. Suddenly her cheeks bulged, and she spat out one little swear lingering in her throat.  
  
Rudy sat in his bed, stunned at the depths of foulness to tumble out of the mouth of a sweet-natured teenage girl. “Wow, Nolle…  
  
I am so proud of you.”  
  
Noelle beamed, still flushed with the exhaustion of releasing sixteen years’ worth of repressed cussing. Noelle’s cheeks bulged again….only to erupt into laughter. Soon, Rudy, too, was laughing, and the room itself was filled with laughter (and swear residue).  
Rudy’s ears flailed out, and with a bug-eyed look Rudy coughed out some dust.  
  
Noelle stared at the dust smeared on her father’s hand. Rudy looked solemn. “Noelle, I think it’s time I told you the truth…”  
  
“I’m part vacuum cleaner.”  
  
—-  
  
_They had traveled deep into the dungeon in the bowels of the earth. Suddenly, the claustrophobic halls expanded into a greater room_ ….  
  
“A cutscene!”  
  
Noelle perked her ears up and forward, leaning closer to the TV with a gamer’s hunch. She sat there for a few seconds, straining her ears, but the sound had been turned too low for that sweet, sweet cutscene music.  
  
“Oh, darn. Wish I could hear the music.”  
  
“Oh, Noelle, you can turn it up. The only other guy is the Warrior, and he’s delusional. Guy thinks he’s a NPC spouting foreshadowing for an incomplete game.”  
  
Noelle adjusted the hospital TV’s buttons the old-fashioned way, as the remote was on paternity leave after irresponsibly siring tiny music players.  
  
Atmospheric music ran through that quiet hospital room.  
  
“ _You dense son of a submariner! Wither away!”_  
  
Smiles filled their vision as they enjoyed the scene together, as they witnessed the bizarre scene of characters innocently smiling while delivering scathing dialogue. _Ill-advised ‘cultural translations’ for a tougher audience,_ Noelle thought. _But I love it._  
  
A room away, a patient quietly fumed and flailed his limbs, ranting again. Muffled as it was through the sounds of battle, and laughter, and conversation, none heard him. He shed a single manly tear through his costume.  
  
—-  
  
_Swarms of Modiglettes tread towards them in the darkness._  
  
Noelle tensed up with a little “eep”, and Rudy turned to his daughter’s terrified face. “What are you waitin’ for? Flare ‘em!”  
  
Noelle shook off her fear…and decided to upgrade the spell to ZettaFlare, for good measure. The vastly over-levelled scale of the spell wrecked the swarm of Modiglettes…and the entire dungeon. The enemies soundly defeated (as well as most of the party), the scorched, half-dead remainder of the party weakly cheered.  
  
"Creepy! Just like that angel doll!”  
  
“Heh, you think so?” Rudy said with relief. “That thing’s a nightmarish abomination!” Rudy glanced toward that faceless angel doll on the counter top, still a little askew after all those hours beside the flowers. He felt it glaring at him judgmentally…as if wishing for his death.  
Rudy noticed, just then, the petals falling from the wilting bouquet…onto that letter enclosed within.  
  
"Kris…they’re a good kid.”  
  
“Earlier, they told me to come visit you.” Noelle replied offhand.  
  
Noelle had never seen her father’s brows rise higher. “Huh. That’s awfully out-of-character for them. I sure hope that isn’t a clue they know something we don’t.”  
  
Noelle laughed nervously. “Yeah, I sure hope so! It’s….probably a sign of some turmoil or trauma that occurred off-screen. That _totally_ happens in RPGs, so it’s not _that_ weird.”  
  
—-  
  
As Noelle defeated foe after foe, progressing on her journey, she spoke less and less. The same went for her father. He reclined in his bed, his head heavy.  
  
Noelle said nothing: not of her anxiety, not of her sadness, not of her ever-growing desire for soda and cheese chips.  
  
“Dad? You haven’t said anything in a while. It’s getting kind of awkward. ‘Companionable silence’ is, uh…not something I’m very good at.”  
  
“Oh, you don’t have to narrate everything,” her father said. “It’s not like you’re playing it for an Internet audience.”  
  
“After all, video games can be…” Her father looked down before looking back at her. “an activity well-suited for urban hermits.”  
  
—-  
  
“THE END”, it said.  
  
Noelle stared at the screen. “What happens next?” Noelle asked, her voice laden with tension.  
  
“The credits screen, of course!” Rudy replied.  
“No, no…I mean…what happens to the characters?” Noelle said, glancing towards the window. Her hands still clenched the controller.  
  
“…Y’know…I like to think they all went home after beating the final boss, and had that long-awaited cake.”  
  
“I don’t think they’ll ever get the cake,” Noelle said quietly, looking down. “They always thought they could, but then things happened no one could predict, and now they have to live a cake-free life.”  
  
“You’re right. Come to think of it…a lot of games have cake you can’t get…” Rudy looked out into the distance, up towards the ceiling. “I suppose all they can hope for is finding joy in cupcakes, muffins and brownies. After all, it’s not like having a cake-free life stops them from finding happiness. There are a lot of caloric baked goods in the world.”  
  
Noelle stared at her father, her eyes wet. “Are we…are we even talking about cake anymore?”  
  
Rudy lifted an eyebrow. “It’s good advice, literal or not, and it’s straight from my supply of fatherly wisdom.”  
  
Then, suddenly, there was a weight on Noelle’s hands, and Noelle’s eyes went wide open. Her father weakly squeezed Noelle’s hand, looking straight at her with a wan smile.  
  
“Noelle, dear. Life stinks. But video games make life stink less. When I’m gone, game so much the WHO gives you a disorder.”  
  
“I promise, Dad.”  
  
Her father laid back on the bed, staring up towards the ceiling again.  
  
“DAD OUT!” He shouted. His tongue stuck out and his eyes turned to X’s.  
  
Tears bubbled in Noelle’s eyes. “His eyes turned to X’s… _just like the video games_ …”  
  
—-  
  
It was a beautiful day outside. Birds were singing, flowers were blooming. On days like these, kids like Kris should be inside playing Nontondo games, but _no_ , Kris had to go be all nice-like and visit someone whose dad had died.  
  
Kris found Noelle standing by the window, light streaming past her silhouette in the early morning light. Kris stared at Noelle’s back in a way that definitely wasn’t creepy.  
The two of them stood like two islands in a quiet ocean…but for the malfunctioning air conditioning system, which was quite terrible at imitating calming ocean waves.  
  
Kris observed a massive snarl in Noelle’s hair. It was so big it looked like her hair had gotten pregnant. _Dear sweet angel mother of Dog could she not have combed her hair a_ little _before visiting her dying father at 3:30 AM?!_ Kris thought. But Kris kept quiet.  
  
“Yo, Noelle, your hair is awful,” Kris said. Kris cringed, hurriedly adding: “Also, sorry ‘bout your dad. Obvious foreshadowed deaths are still super sad.”  
  
Noelle spoke in a voice drained of tears, due to a quick surgery she had to improve tear evacuation in her face. Thankfully, Kris wasn’t looking at Noelle’s face.  
  
“I suppose so,” Noelle said quietly. “But if it means I got to spend time with my dad, one last time…then it was worth it for my hair to look like it got goshdarn pregnant.”  
  
_Oh thank Dog we agree_ , Kris thought. _Would have been awkward if_ I _brought it up_.  
  
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do next,” Noelle said, almost to herself. “Life’s…never going to go back to normal, with my dad being all corpsey.”  
  
Kris looked at the bed. It felt empty. “It’s kind of ambiguous whether he’s a corpse or dust.”  
  
“You don’t know…maybe we scheduled a cremation service ahead of time, ‘cause he was on his way out anyway.”  
  
The room was quiet again, but for the annoying creak of the malfunctioning air conditioning. It sounded like a wooden ship breaking apart in a storm-tossed… _No, no. Make for a more subtle metaphor,_ Kris told their own brain.  
  
The moment carried on, stretching out like a lazy morning. In that unhurried moment, where a person could simply be _alive_ , Kris lost track of time. It didn’t matter: it was either 9:27 AM or croissant o’clock.  
  
What did Noelle see, in one of the best views in all of Hometown? The houses below? The woods beyond? Undyne arresting Snowdrake for streaking?  
  
“Thank you, Kris,” Noelle said quietly. “Thank you for somehow knowing roughly when my dad was going to die, despite having zero medical knowledge.”  
  
Noelle’s ears floated up. A few seconds passed. Noelle turned around, exposing her hideously enlarged tear ducts.  
“OH MY DOG KRIS DO YOU HAVE TIME TRAVEL POWERS?!”  
  
But Kris had long since bounced the joint.  
  
—-  
  
Everyone knew it was coming. The foreshadowing was very obvious.  
  
Kris stood stiffly in the doorway, a sense of unease building in their various body parts.  
At first, the room seemed unoccupied. Then, Kris caught a soft, high-pitched noise. Kris caught Noelle sobbing, her face concealed under a waterfall of hair. (Much like a waterfall was wet, it was also wet. But with tears.) A thought occurred to Kris, unbidden, that her hair was _beautiful:_ long, and blond, and finely combed, and increasingly stained with tears and snot. Her arms wrapped her arms around her body.  
  
Kris did a double-take.  
  
“Noelle…why are you brandishing a disembodied pair of your own arms?”  
  
Noelle coughed out her sobs and swallowed.  
  
“These are my sorrow arms, Kris….I grow them whenever I am enduring the crushing pain of existence.”  
  
Kris’s blank face somehow looked hesitant.  
  
“I doubt that. I’ve never grown any sorrow arms.”  
  
“…oh. I’m sorry, Kris,” Noelle said, a little subdued. “Growing a second pair of arms under overwhelming sorrow must be a monster-only thing.”  
  
“I only wish…I could have played Dragon Blazers III with him.”  
  
Kris paused, tilting their head just a fraction of an inch. “How long would it take to finish Dragon Blazers III?” It was a mundane inquiry, very similar to “Do you have croissants?” in how mundane it was.  
  
Noelle sniffed. In a brittle voice, like a piece of plastic (the brittle kind), she said: “It’s pretty big. About eight hours, I-I think.”  
  
“If you could finish the game with your father, would you?”  
  
“I’d do anything for it.”  
  
“Would you give me hair-care tips?”  
  
“…what?”  
  
“’Cause I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful your hair was, despite the fact it’s increasingly stained with tears and snot.”  
  
“Kris, I am mourning my dead dad. Please read the room before asking for hair care tips.” Noelle’s arms tightened around herself. “But, yes…theoretically, I would provide hair care tips.”  
  
“Despite that unwanted tone of voice, I’m gonna be the better person and rewind time so you can play a video game with your dad, all good Samaritan-like.” Kris said.  
  
“…what? Rewind time?”  
  
—-  
  
“Yo. Red SOUL.” Kris said blankly, sashaying towards a SOUL in a birdcage.  
  
“I need you all up inside me.” Kris said, as seductively as a teenager of unclear age could while still being legal. Kris opened up the cage and their SOUL eagerly jumped into their chest cavity.  
  
“PSYCHE!” Kris exclaimed. “I _knew_ you’d automatically rewind time, sucka! And I’m gonna make Noelle slightly less sad!”

**Author's Note:**

> This work was made with the beta-reading help of [Batter-Sempai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/batter_sempai/pseuds/batter_sempai) and [Ihasafandom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ihasafandom/pseuds/Ihasa).
> 
> Feel free to comment, either here or on the author's [Tumblr](https://argentdandelion.tumblr.com/).


End file.
